Benedict Murray

Name: Benedict “Benny” Murray

Gender: Male

Age: 18

Grade: 12

School: GHHS

Hobbies and Interests: The church, hookah smoking, programming, Nintendo, metalcore, smartphone repair, puzzles

Appearance: Benedict is short with a lean, skinny build standing at 5’6” and weighing 139 pounds. He has a well-enough trained body to hold a straight posture all the time, but is not extraordinarily muscular or physically strong. His skin has a tanned tone due to his kurdish origins and his face shape is square which is highlighted by his strong cheekbones and a well-trimmed black beard. Benedict has thick, bushy eyebrows he irregularly trims simply to look better and cleaner. He also has green, deep-set eyes, a big aquiline nose and thick lips. Benedict has long, voluminous and thick black hair. He likes to showcase them by styling them into a pompadour.

As for the dressing style of Benedict, he casually wears hoodies or sweaters with jeans, though while he is at work he prefers to wear white or blue button-ups with black slacks. On the day of the abduction Benedict Murray wore black trainers, paired with black jeans and a grey denim shirt plus a white t-shirt underneath it. For the trip he also had his aviators on him.

Biography: Benedict Murray was born on September 7, 1999 to Jackson Murray and Tracy Murray nee Smith in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Jackson, a second-generation immigrant with Kurdish origins, works as a local dentist in Chattanooga with Tracy working as a dental assistant. Jackson and Tracy were both christians who regularly attended church with Benedict, who became fascinated by God, Jesus and the stories in the Bible as a child. When he was eight he began to work as an altar boy at the church and with that he learned his first steps of holding responsibility and grew into the local church community.

Benedict perceived his parents as loving, hard-working parents and had lots of respect for them and vice-versa. Their relationship started to change when he hit puberty, as Benedict became more rebellious, neglecting his responsibility in doing chores and getting into arguments with his parents. He coped with that tension by playing on his Gameboy Advance a lot to feel better, diving deep into the worlds of Pokemon, Mario and Zelda. His parents noticed the increased amount of time Benedict spent on playing on the Gameboy Advance so they decided to limit his time he could play per day. Thinking they put an halt to his consumption of video games they soon realised that Benedict spent a lot more time watching Japanese cartoons on the television — so-called anime. Appalled by the fact that their son watched anime like Dragon Ball Z, One Piece or Naruto, series where some characters were overly sexualised, they outright banned him watching television without them. Benedict responded angrily and could not understand why his parents were acting like that, but eventually accepted his fate and continued to use his one-hour to play Gameboy daily.

Benedict was a creative child. He was interested in riddles of all sorts. Puzzles, sudoku, card tricks, riddles, jokes, crossword puzzles. He liked to debunk tricks and puzzles and always tried his best solving it on his own and was quickly annoyed if other people told him the solution or solved it for him. After solving a puzzle he loved to share it with other kids from his school and tried to let them solve them by themselves. The same went for jokes - as a kid he hoarded jokes he had heard from other kids and adults - so many in fact that he decided to write them down in a personal joke book as he could not memorise them all, so he could retell them to others. This not only lead him to have a reputation of being funny and entertaining, but through him being exposed to interactions with other kids his age and adults and his curiosity to learn more about humour, it lead to him becoming a wittier person in general. He loves humouring others and liked the idea of his image of being popular so much that he often exaggerates when talking about himself to make himself look better in front of the others - wanting to present himself in a good light - which rubs people the wrong way as he began to brag more and more about himself as he grew up.

In school he always tried his best to pay attention in class and to get good grades and he succeeded; one can call him an overachiever. His true skills shine in science classes as he is always fascinated by science as well as learning facts and trivia he gains from school. In programming, biology, physics, mathematics and chemistry his grades varied from A to B. The Murrays are proud of Benedicts achievements in high school. Benedict is less talented in the subjects of literature, history or Spanish where his grades varied from B to C. Murray does not like Spanish at all and regrets taking the class as he finds it extremely difficult to learn a completely new languages and analysing literature or memorising facts from history are not something that he liked to learn and thus it felt a little bit harder for him to do so.

He gets along well with his teachers and his schoolmates. Benedict Murray has a calm and cool-headed personality and can get along with most of his classmates as he often tries to enact like an entertainer in conversations and has no qualms with breaking the ice. As he was getting more social, at the age of 14 he eventually got offered a cigarette by a couple of friends of his and decided to try it out, not thinking it would harm him or possibly it being that addicting. So he began smoking with other kids from his school. His parents eventually found out and obviously they were not happy with his smoking habit and showed their disappointment to him. However, that did not stop him from continue to smoke behind their backs when he was with his friends, trying to hide it as good as possible. He had never been caught by a teacher as he never smokes at school.

Around the same age he also picked up the genre of metalcore by getting introduced to the band Bring Me The Horizon, which he quickly became fascinated by with their deep lyrics and their hard-hitting sound. He would love to see them in concert live one day but could not afford a festival ticket.

At the age of sixteen he began to have a student job to earn money for himself. He had various reasons for working. For one, his cigarette addiction had grown stronger, since he was feeling an increased amount of stress from school. Cigarettes were becoming the primary coping mechanism to calm him down. So he used most of his money to buy cigarettes, as he did not like borrowing any from his friends as he is always getting a guilty conscience quickly. As a long-term goal Benedict is also saving his money to eventually move out from his parents home and finance an own flat to proof that he can be independent and live on his own. At the age of sixteen he started working as a paperboy which barely earned him any money, so he switched to get a job as a waiter at the age of seventeen, which was stressful for him but lead to him having a decent income. He eventually dropped the job as he did not enjoy it and he is currently working at an Apple store.

Benedict has steadily been fascinated by smartphones and happened to specialised in them by chance when researching on how to repair his broken iPhone. He continued to learn more about them and in his programming class and in his free time he tried learn to program smartphone apps thinking it would be fun to create a game he could put up to download - a plan not yet made real by him yet. However, with his software and hardware knowledge he learned to repair them for his parents and friends and Benedict took it even a step further by creating a YouTube channel where he explains various bug fixes and solutions to common problems. By monetizing these videos on his YouTube he found another way of having income.

When his friend group and him were about the age of eighteen they began to legally visit hookah bars which is an activity enjoyed by him due to him loving the taste of hookah and the company of his friends. They had fun and Benedict continued to amaze his friends with vape tricks he performed. When turning eighteen he felt much more freed from restrictions set by society and his parents and he has almost saved enough money to be able to buy an own flat.

In his free time he still does church activities - not being particularly religious in a strict way, but more religious in a spiritual way. To this day the church takes a big part of his life and philosophy to deal with the world around him. He even considered studying theology in his future, but instead decided to apply for an apprenticeship at the apple store he works in as well as several other companies around Chattanooga.

Advantages: Benedict is a calm, charismatic and confident fellow. He is able to cheer up other people no matter how horrible the situation is.

Disadvantages: Benedict is not humble and might rub people the wrong way with his attitude and people might consider him to be arrogant. He is physically weak by being smaller than the average student and does not have enough stamina due to his smoking habit.

Designated Number: Male Student No. 38

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Designated Weapon: Shotgun Flashlight

Conclusion: The hell kind of name is Benedict? Is it 1776? I can already hear Lourvey plotting a time travel series with this guy as the main character... - Josh Baines

'The above biography is as written by Sh4de. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Sh4de

Kills: None

Killed By: Justin Greene

Collected Weapons: Shotgun Flashlight (assigned weapon)

Allies: Liberty Wren

Enemies: 

Mid-game Evaluation: Benedict woke and sought a moment to pray to himself on the outskirts of the Art Exhibition, as he felt horrified by his own thoughts- musing on one of the game's most fundamental rules, that somebody had to die, every day. He was only roused from his thoughts in a particularly violent way- Justin Greene struck him with a tire iron right in the head, while Benedict was distracted. The blow opened a nasty head wound, and Benedict was driven to the ground by his pain, unable to do anything but cower. From the nearby forest emerged Aliya Kimia Nemati, Liberty Wren, Tony Acardi, and Michael Froese, the latter-most of whom leveraged a gun at Justin- which a horrified Benny tried to talk down and away. The others tried at length to calm Justin down, Justin was on his part defensive and threatened. Benny tried to interject, standing and crudely bandaging himself, trying to appeal to the others with an appeal to work together. His plan caught their attention in particular: kill only one person a day, to buy time for rescue. Said attention was in the form of mixed pity and revulsion- the most sympathetic to him only tried to reinforce the fact that he had a head injury and needed to be treated. Disgusted, Benny moved on, only a Bert concerned for his health followed.

Bert and Benny spent most of the day wandering- Bert regularly checking on Benny's mental state and health, to his irritation. Bert was willing to go along with the plan, and now Benny just needed more recruits. He found one in the rice paddies, late at night, but it was a girl he had a lot of prior baggage with. A stand-offish Camila parried most of his efforts- he tried to recruit her and she retorted that he wasn't convincing, he tried to apologize for their failed romantic liaison at prom and she brushed him off bluntly. He accepted the latter, tried to fix his wording on the former, to try and win her to his side. He wouldn't get the chance- the internal bleeding and damage from the wound Justin had inflicted onto him finally caught up with him and he collapsed, never to get up again.

Post-Game Evaluation: Even we didn't see that one coming. Wasn't even listed on the betting table. Impressive! In a particularly pathetic way. - Josie Knight

Memorable Quotes: "I-I know it is very cruel and inhumane to say this out loud, but everyone of us is worth exactly twenty-four hours." - The gist of Benedict's plan, as he explained at the Art Exhibition (while nursing a bad head injury). He intended to stretch out the one-death-a-day rule to buy them all time to be rescued.

"But, don't worry, it was an accident. He p-panicked a bit after waking up, but I'm fine and he's fine as well." - Concerning Justin's (as of yet unknown) fatal blow against him with a tire iron.

Threads
Below is a list of threads containing Benedict, in chronological order.

V7 Pregame: Prom: The Trip: V7:
 * The Good Times Are Killing Me (#SwiftBall)
 * I Turned Into A Martian (#SwiftBall)
 * Getting Down With The Clown
 * Room 702: I Hope The Breakfasts Are Free
 * More like FART EXHIBITION
 * My Body Is Ready

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Benedict Murray. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Ah, Benny. Benny really leaned hard into his handler's penchant for chaos and oldschool let-it-fall-where-it-may freeform narrative, and quite successfully in my opinion. Benny's Pregame is decent and gives a solid vibe for him as a person, especially given his fairly late entry, but where he really stands out is in action on the island itself. In the space of a mere eleven posts, Benny leans against a wall smoking like the coolest guy in the universe, gets brained by a legendary tire iron, gives a speech about the true value of school spirit, tells Michael Froese to shut up, then reconnects with his Prom date to discuss their truly awkward evening, only to abruptly drop dead. It is just as wild a ride as that sounds.

I think what specifically makes Benny work well is that all of this stuff, every weird beat of it, comes from what's going on around him. Benny is a character who's very in tune with the narrative in a way, and while he guides it he's also shaped by it. Looking at his speech, for instance, I can't say 100% that it was originally intended to be brain-damaged ramblings—maybe it was, or maybe it just sorta came out a little garbled and everyone reacted that way and his story recognized it as a great idea and ran with it. Maybe it was intended from the word go for Benny to die from the abrupt blow to the cranium, and maybe it just seemed like it'd be a cool thing to have happen. Whatever the case, when Benny was on the scene something was always happening, and his voice had this edge of sincerity to it that called for attention. And at the same time, his arc is a great reminder that the game is just a game, and sometimes the most fun thing to do is to shock everyone by flopping dead at their feet. - MurderWeasel